Celebrity Crime

Screen star Thelma Todd’s untimely death in 1935 set off wild speculation about the cause of her demise. Was she murdered or was she the unfortunate victim of carbon monoxide poisoning?
by Benjamin Welton
Hollywood has always been about making grand illusions. The movies are...

Updated April 1, 2015 The murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy on November 1, 2007 caused a global controversy. Not so much for the crime itself, although it was certainly a brutal murder, but because of the disputed guilt or innocence of two of the three...

Oct. 28, 2013How would the forensics case against O.J. Simpson stack up today? A former supervisor of NYPD’s Forensic Investigations Division takes a look. by John PaolucciThe murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman initiated an investigation and an eight month trial...

An excerpt from Pro Bono: The 18-Year Defense of Caril Ann Fugate by Jeff McArthur (Bandwagon Books). An account of how her trial lawyer – who believed in her innocence – continued to represent her for free until she was paroled in 1976. In 1959, 19-year-old Charlie...

Carl Wanderer’s precipitous drop from a highly decorated World War I hero to a philandering murderer – who might or might not have been either a pedophile or a closeted homosexual – shocked Chicago and ushered in an era of widespread cynicism and urban violence. ...

Gerald Chapman became America’s first “celebrity gangster” and its first “Public Enemy No. 1.” President Coolidge pardoned him from the Federal charges against him so that the State of Connecticut could hang him.
by Robert Walsh
“Death itself isn’t dreadful, but hanging...

After an 11-day bender, Bob Wood, the co-creator of the infamous comic book Crime Does Not Pay, admits to beating his girlfriend to death in a whisky and blood-drenched hotel room. This rampage was only one step in the artist’s downfall, and the story of Wood is one of the...

Aaron Hernandez
Back in 2010, the button-downed New England Patriots discounted the scouting reports that said Aaron Hernandez scored at the bottom of the “social maturity” scale. In 2012, still smitten, the Patriots added $40 million to his contract. On the day Hernandez...

Jean Harris (photo NPR)
A distraught Jean Harris paid one last visit to her estranged lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, intending to take her own life but ended up shooting him when the famed “Diet Doc” tried to wrest the handgun from her. What should have been ruled an accidental...

With good reason, conspiracy theories abound about the shooting deaths of oil scion Ned Doheny and his companion/secretary Hugh Plunkett at the fortress-like mansion Greystone in Los Angeles.
by Benjamin Welton
On the night of February 17, 1929, two would-be writers...

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998. Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: Read More